“Sexism,” Bird wrote, “is judging people by their sex where sex doesn’t matter.” It is an admirably simple definition, reminiscent of the definitions of racism that were current before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it reveals the perennial political difficulty of feminism, which is that sex often matters, and matters more than anything. It is fundamental in a way that race or class is not. Men don’t carry babies. Feminism had to contend not just against bigotry but also against nature.
